Dastan

Dastan comes from Persian, where dāstān means a story or a tale. In the old literatures of Iran and the Turkic-speaking world, a dastan was a long spoken epic, half history and half legend, performed by a reciter in front of a listening crowd. The name gives a Polish parent a plain meaning to read off a chart: opowieść, historia.

The origin here is filed simply as other, outside the Slavic, Latin, and Greek roots that fill most Polish name books. That places Dastan among the newer arrivals. It has no name-day in the Polish calendar and no diminutive worn smooth by use.

A boy named Dastan in a Wrocław class register has a name that means the very thing a story is. There is no saint behind it. The Persian dāstān is still alive today, printed on the spines of epics and used in the same plain sense of opowieść, historia.